Folk Music Quotes

• Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music.

  

  Will Sheff Okkervil River
  • Money
  • Culture
  • Enemy

• When you listen to the Anthology of American Folk Music, or anything like that - a compilation of garage bands from the Northeast in the early '60s - you're not necessarily listening to the band and thinking about the lead singer, or the story of the group, or the context or the mythology of the group. You're just listening to the song and whether or not it has a hook.

  

  Bradford Cox
  • Song
  • Band
  • Anthology

• My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center.

  

  Ben Harper
  • Music
  • Family
  • California

• I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.

  

  Bradford Cox
  • Music
  • History
  • Library

• I think the idea of that is more inspired by the folk music that we’re so into, both playing and listening to. There’s a lot of stories in that, a lot of great rock and roll stuff.

  

  Tim Brennan Dropkick Murphys
  • Inspired
  • Stories
  • Folk Music

• I think that anything is a form of folk music. That's just me being glib, but the thing I like the best about humans, and there are not many other things besides this, is that humans make culture. If you're an artist, a big part of folk is noticing what other people are doing and incorporating it and changing it - the way that songs warp and change over time.

  

  Will Sheff Okkervil River
  • Culture
  • Change
  • Humans

• Judy Henske, who was the then reigning queen of folk music, said to me at The Troubadour, 'Honey, in this town there are four sexes. Men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers.

  

  Linda Ronstadt
  • Music
  • Men
  • Women

• The way I approach things is from an experimental folk music standpoint.

  

  Sxip Shirey
  • Approach
  • Experimental
  • Folk Music

• Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

  

  John Lennon The Beatles
  • People
  • Dead
  • Voices